Austria's "Krone" newspaper may be called "racist" and "anti-Semitic"

Austria's biggest selling daily, the yellow-press newspaper "Neue Kronen-Zeitung", or "Krone", may now legally be called "racist" and "anti-Semitic", as the paper's publisher has decided not to appeal a court verdict from April 2004 which granted another newspaper's columnist the right to use these terms . "Krone", published the inflential 83-year-old Hans Dichand, had sought a court injunction against any such claims, which were published by the newspaper "Der Standard", but it lost the case. A "Standard" columnist had accused "Krone" of using "badly nationalistic or anti-Semitic jargon". The judge on the case accepted a 50-page analysis by the defense which sought to prove that over the past two decades, the popular newspaper had repeatedly published articles, essays and poems playing down the Holocaust or ridiculing African immigrants. Around 40 per cent of Austrians read the "Neue Kronen-Zeitung", and with 850,000 copies sold daily it remains by far the biggest paper in the country.